Seeing Is Deceiving ‘”Once upon a time, Antonio J. Mendez, 59, a lifelong student of the “accumulation of millimeters” that form the human identity, could alter your appearance so profoundly that not even your mother could tell who you were.

Though his disguises often had to work only for a day, or an hour, or a split second, his audience could be extremely judgmental. A sloppy job could mean death.

Nine years ago, Mendez, the son of a Nevada copper miner, retired from the CIA after a quarter-century. He had worked his way up from the lowly forgery unit–bogus signatures, altered documents, counterfeit currency and the like–to become head of the espionage agency’s division of disguise, with a rank equal to that of a two-star general.

He created some of the CIA’s most elaborate, if little-known, productions–the ploys, skits, scams, masquerades and sleights of hand designed to dupe foreign agents and enemy surveillance teams. His specialty, he writes in a new memoir, “The Master of Disguise,” was “exfiltration,” wherein endangered persons are whisked away from bad guys and taken to safety.’

Astrobiology: on interplanetary biotic transfer.

Paul Davies (Imperial College London, UK) presents a

review of current ideas concerning the seeding from elsewhere of

life on Earth.

The latest issue, as always, of the Flummery Digest fires refreshing potshots — or at times withering blasts — at the absurdities of political correctness, excess regulation, and our litigation-proneness each month.

Slow Down: If your car sports a transponder for “Fast Lane” (MA), “EZ-Pass” (NY), or a similar automated toll collection system, read this. Apparently they are monitoring the speed with which you pass through the tollgates. It also occurs to me that they could determine from the time interval between your entry to and exit from the tollway whether your average speed exceeded the speed limit. [via CamWorld]

Defend Your Medical Data: The ACLU is mounting a campaign for public comment on the national medical privacy regulations proposed in November 1999 by the Clinton Administration. A previous accumulation of over 2,400 comments solicited by the ACLU was refused by the Dept of HHS on a technicality.

The ACLU says that the current proposed regulations are a reasonable first step and that their position is to encourage the government to take them further. However, from my vantage points both as a health care provider and a concerned citizen, they sound like ominous and objectionable privacy erosion!

The regulations dismantle real legal barriers to law enforcement and government access to medical records. Law enforcement agents would obtain patient records with simple written demands to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies without the necessity for judicial review or the issuance of a warrant. A patient would receive no notice or opportunity to contest the demand. The failure to require patient consent to release of information erodes the bedrock principle that patients own their medical records and must authorize the disclosure of their medical information or if they so choose, decline to give access.

Police would be free to browse all computerized medical records to seek matches for blood, DNA or other health traits. The proposed regulations in essence facilitate the creation of a government health databank. Although the system may initially be established to support “functions authorized by law,” the regulations themselves state that “government data are notoriously susceptible to expansion and abuse.” A major concern is that patients, when faced with the realization that government agencies might have access to their medical history, would avoid needed treatment or lie about their history.

Other recent ACLU concerns include support for Senator Patrick Leahy’s proposed federal legislation to protect innocent people sentenced to death; and an initiative against racial profiling in traffic enforcement, the nationwide problem euphemistically referred to as being stopped for “driving while black.”